Head of Exploration
Lilongwe
- Organization: UNDP - United Nations Development Programme
- Location: Lilongwe
- Grade: Junior level - NO-B, National Professional Officer - Locally recruited position
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Occupational Groups:
- Poverty Reduction
- Civil Society and Local governance
- Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction
- Scientist and Researcher
- Innovations for Sustainable Development
- Managerial positions
- Closing Date: Closed
Background
- Building on locally-sourced solutions, finding things that work and expanding on them;
- Rapid testing and iteration to implement what works and go beyond the obvious solutions;
- Combining the best understanding, ideas and expertise to generate collective knowledge;
- Accelerating progress by bringing expertise, creativity and collective intelligence to bear.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Identify, visualize and communicate emerging development trends,data, technologies and issues with a particular focus on the edges and “below the radar screen” events, opportunities and players, and systemically map their impacts on economy, environment, society, and livelihoods of the poorest;
- Together with the Accelerator lab team, map and assess local solutions and define pathways for their scale up in policies or markets;
- Identify new sources of evidence and insights, analyze and visualize patterns in unstructured sources of data, present new insights in accessible and comprehensive ways to enable sensemaking and analysis;
- Proactively explore and identify the new methods/approaches and frontier knowledge to tackle development challenges, collaborate with the Experimentation lead to turn these into learning options for addressing specific policy issues in the country;
- Contribute to the formulation of the Accelerator Lab service lines to the UNDP Country Programme based on findings from horizon scanning, systems’ mapping, and local knowledge.
- Map potential partners across the public and private sectors with versatile expertise to strengthen the Lab’s capacities for acceleration thereby expanding the Lab’s distributed network both nationally and internationally;
- Explore the diversification of funding and investment sources through proactively mapping potential partners and building value proposition for their investment in the Lab and its portfolio of experiments;
- Collaborate with programme / project managers and CO senior management to anticipate the emerging needs, shape the demand from the clients and support the CO to develop a pipeline of emerging projects responding to those;
- Contribute insights and provide input to the programme managers and CO senior managemnte to coordinate targeted partnership and communicationactivities for relevant projects / initiatives.
- Support identification of future skills required for the Accelerator Lab, the Country Programme and Lab’s clients;
- Design and deliver horizon scanning trainings for partners and UNDP, help embed horizon scanning and attention to the ‘edge’ activities in the CO and with the partners;
- Organize and implement knowledge sharing and network events;
- Lead other activities related to the design and operations of the Accelerator Lab.
- Share findings from the exploration on future trends, new methodologies/approaches, potential partnership, funding opportunities, and others within UNDP and with partners;
- Proactively use blog posts and social media to share insights, attract partners and help position Accelerator Lab at the forefront of the exploration of new trends.
Competencies
- Ability to make new and useful ideas work: Level 4: Adapt with complex concepts and challenges convention purposefully.
- Ability to persuade others to follow: Level 4: Generates commitment, excitement and excellence in others.
- Ability to improve performance and satisfaction: Level 4: Models independent thinking and action.
- Ability to listen, adapt, persuade and transform: Level 4: Synthesizes information to communicate independent analysis.
- Ability to get things done while exercising good judgement: Level 4: Meets goals and quality criteria for delivery of products or services
- Ability to manage organizational resources and deployment in pursuit of innovation approaches and initiatives : Level 5: Originates, Catalyzes new ideas, methods, and applications to pave a path for innovation and continuous improvement in professional area of expertise.
Required Skills and Experience
- Master’s degree in Social sciences, Data science, Statistics, Physics, Computer Science, or related field and minimum of 2 years of professional experience in development programming or policy; social innovation; partnership building; engagement (public and private sector) and/or resource mobilization
- Bachelor’s degree in Social sciences, Data science, Statistics, Physics, Computer Science, or related field and minimum of 4 years of professional experience in development programming or policy; social innovation; partnership building; engagement (public and private sector) and/or resource mobilization
- Professional experience in development programming or policy and social innovation;
- Demonstrated capacity in horizon scanning.
- Professional experience in partnership building and engagement (public and private sector) and resource mobilization;
- Proven professional knowledge and experience in at least one of the following: Future thinking and Foresight, research, and Systems Mapping;
- Key awareness of key global and regional trends;
- Demonstrated access to networks of edge innovators.
- Proficiency in written and spoken English.
- Experimentation (instituting rapid learning about emerging challenges through design and running of a portfolio of experiments that is coherent with the type of challenges UNDP COs are mandated to address), and
- Ethnographic Solutions Mapping: deep immersion in community dynamics, identification of and work with lead users, and implications of bottom up solutions for the policy design
- Exploration: The exploration function focuses on discovery and sensemaking of emerging trends, implications for systemic impacts and risks, and their potential for accelerating progress toward SDGs. Its work feeds into the portfolio of experiments ensuring its coherence with the emerging risks and opportunities (direct collaboration with the Experimentation Lead), and connects local dynamics and solutions (link with the Ethnography Lead) into the broader national and international ecosystem of potential funders, partners, and allies thereby increasing the chances for acceleration. While critical for the functioning of the Accelerator Lab, the exploration function will also service the Country Office as determined and agreed with the UNDP senior management.
Disclaimer
Important applicant information
All posts in the GS categories are subject to local recruitment.
Applicant information about UNDP rosters
Note: UNDP reserves the right to select one or more candidates from this vacancy announcement. We may also retain applications and consider candidates applying to this post for other similar positions with UNDP at the same grade level and with similar job description, experience and educational requirements.
Workforce diversity
UNDP is committed to achieving diversity within its workforce, and encourages all qualified applicants, irrespective of gender, nationality, disabilities, sexual orientation, culture, religious and ethnic backgrounds to apply. All applications will be treated in the strictest confidence.
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